What is Domain Authority?
Domain Authority or DA is a ranking score developed by Moz that tells the likeliness of your webpage to show up higher on a Search Engine Result Page (S.E.R.P.). It is important to remember that Domain Authority is not a Google ranking factor. SERP ranking is not affected by a web page’s domain authority.
Moz looks at the backlinks of your website for the most part in determining the DA. Tracking the changes in DA over time can give a fairly accurate image of the off-page SEO for a webpage. To understand and use DA effectively in your marketing strategy, think of it as a relative term. As with many parts of digital marketing, your domain authority should be higher than the competition. Your energy will be better spent optimizing other parts of your website if your DA is already high.
How Domain Authority Affects (DA) Your Blog?
Domain Authority is a metric to judge your website’s backlinks and their quality. It is not a ranking factor used by Google or any other search engine to rank your webpage. Simply speaking, DA does not affect your blog, it is a tool used to improve your blog.
Content marketing is very important when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. Although Google does not consider DA in their rankings, there is a correlation between DA and SERP ranking.
DA score ranges from 1 to 100. There are a couple of ways in which you can improve your score.
- Do a link audit. Make a list of your competition, find their links, and compare them to your links. Also, analyze each of your backlinks manually and see if they are pointing to the right web pages and anchor texts. (Here is a comprehensive guide on link audit by Neil Patel)
- Backlinks. Not all backlinks are created equal. different websites with different DA and niches will affect your DA score differently. Make sure that the links that you get are from websites in similar industries and the anchor text is relevant.
How does Domain Authority fit in your Marketing Plan?
By now you understand what is DA and what are the factors influencing it. Now it’s time to learn, how to incorporate that learning into your marketing plan.
Domain Authority is largely affected by the backlinks you get. So to improve your DA you need to have more backlinks. That is the easy part, the difficult part is to understand how to get that.
Step 1: Competition
Use tools like Ahrefs and Ubersuggest to look at the competition. See what are the top pages that get the most backlinks. Read and understand those articles and look for areas of improvement.
Step 2: Content
Write rich content, improve on your competition. You may want to add infographics to make the information easy to understand. Aim for the complete guide and understanding of the topic you choose to write about. Authoritative content that includes the main keyword and related keywords. But make sure that the content is relevant and not fluff.
Step 3: Outreach
When you have written the best content for your blog, email all the websites linking to your competition. In the email mention how your blog is better than the competition. Also mention some of the key differences between them.
A sample email template
Hey Sophia,
I see that you have lined to <the website> in one of your blogs <link of the blog>. I just would like to turn your attention to this <link to your blog> blog I wrote. It explains the topic in much more detail and also has a handy infographic for better understanding.
Please feel free to link my article to your blog as well. In my opinion, it would be a better experience for your readers.
Best,
Abhay
Conclusion
Domain authority may seem complicated at first. Many factors contribute to your ranking, and analyzing them all may seem daunting.
Nevertheless, once you get the hang of DA, it’s worth monitoring and optimizing for it.
